The Natural Sciences at St. Lawrence

The Arecibo & Green Bank Observatories

AO'D, Evan Smith, Jeff Miller

Aileen O'Donoghue, Evan Smith '16, Jeffrey Miller

St. Lawrence University is a member of the Undergraduate ALFALFA Team, a consortium of 20 institutions engaged in a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to promote undergraduate research within the ALFALFA project.

The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey is an on-going blind survey of extragalactic neutral hydrogen (HI). The survey uses the largest single dish radio telescope in the world, the 305-meter (1000-ft.) dish at the Arecibo Observatory, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. When the survey is completed, ALFALFA will have detected more than 25,000 extragalactic HI line sources out to z~0.06.

The NSF funded a 5-year undergraduate workshop, held at the observatory, in which students and their faculty mentors have the opportunity to operate the telescope, and students present the results of their own research. A new grant from the NSF continues the project for a 3-year follow up survey, in which we go back and investigate in further detail interesting objects discovered in the first survey. The current grant covers workshops held at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, where the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope is used to observe objects too far north to be seen from Arecibo. Students and astronomers from St. Lawrence have attended all the workshops, as well as other observing sessions. Photos from our trips to the observatory are found below.